Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  This was the violent beginning of the suppression of religion, which over the next fifteen years or so saw more than 97 per cent of the Soviet Union’s churches, synagogues and mosques closed down. Within two years of Lenin’s edict more than thirty bishops and 1,200 priests had been killed and thousands more jailed. In Perm, witnesses said they saw Archbishop Andronik’s eyes had been gouged out, his cheeks hollowed and his ears cut off before he was shot. Bishop Hermogenes of Tobolsk was tied to a rock and thrown into the river.

  On the other hand, the Bolsheviks raised a huge amount of booty from robbing the churches. In November 1921 alone, according to a report to Lenin, they seized 500 kilos of gold, 400,000 of silver, 35,670 of diamonds, 265 of assorted gemstones ‘and 964 other antique objects that will be weighed’.8

  *1 Shlyapnikov lost his job but turned to writing, and some others were given minor diplomatic postings. After the purges, following Stalin’s death, being sent abroad – away from the power centre – was a routine ‘punishment’ for troublesome officials up to the collapse of the USSR.

  *2 Until he emigrated in autumn 1921. The Lenin-Gorky friendship is fascinating and has merited at least one book on its own. Gorky was a vociferous critic yet could write, a few months before leaving the country: ‘Lenin’s mistakes are the mistakes of an honest person, and no reformer in the world has ever operated without making mistakes…He always speaks of one thing – getting rid of social inequality. His faith in this is the faith of a fanatic, but an educated fanatic, not a metaphysical or mystical one…In a religious era, Lenin would have been considered a saint. A stern realist, a shrewd politician, Lenin is gradually becoming a legendary figure. This is good.’ And when Lenin died in 1924 Gorky wrote an extraordinary paean of praise to him. The strangest thing about Gorky, though, was his willingness to return to Stalin’s Russia in 1932, where he died four years later.

  *3 One person whom Gorky couldn’t save was the former Tsar’s elderly cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, an academic historian who had never held any official post or court functions. He wanted to retire to write. Gorky met Lenin in Moscow; Lenin said he would send a letter to the Petrograd Soviet telling them to reopen the case against him. By the time Gorky returned to Petrograd the Grand Duke had been executed. Gorky maintained that Lenin must have known about the execution at the time they had their meeting.

  *4 In October 1920 Lenin gave permission for Yuli Martov to leave Russia. He spent his last years in Berlin, an exile again and a seriously ill man. He launched the Menshevik paper, Socialist Messenger, and disputed with Lenin to the end. One of his last pieces of journalism accused Lenin of conducting ‘bloody debauchery…in Russia, which is being carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of the teaching which proclaimed the brotherhood of people labouring for the highest goal of humanity…A party of death penalties is as much an enemy of the working class as is a party of pogroms.’ Lenin seldom expressed any regrets, but once, in summer 1921, he did wistfully say it was ‘a pity Martov is not with us. What an amazing comrade he was…such a pure man.’ He died in April 1923. When Lenin heard the news, near death himself and unable to speak, ‘he looked desperately sad’, said Nadya.

  *5 Between March and November 1921 there was hardly a day when somewhere in Russia a Red Army detachment was not on duty linked to ‘internal disorders’ against peasants. According to the government’s own records, in thirty-six provinces during 1921 there were 171,185 army casualties, the vast majority minor injuries, but the numbers show how serious the fighting was.

  *6 Alexander Antonov escaped and tried to form another rebel band near Voronezh, 350 kilometres from Tambov. He was located by the Cheka in June 1922 and killed, alongside his brother Dmitry.

  50

  Intimations of Mortality

  ‘Lenin’s health seemed to be one of the indestructible pillars of the Revolution…It seemed as if…[he] would never wear out.’

  Leon Trotsky, 1924

  For two years after the attempt on his life in August 1918, it seemed as though Lenin had fully recovered. He showed no obvious visible health problems to outsiders. But he was eating poorly, sleeping badly and taking none of the regular holidays that used to restore his energy levels – and keep his temper in check. He was under relentless pressure. A few occasional hunting trips and Sundays in Gorki were not enough.

  He noticed a potential problem himself. Having always been fit, he was accustomed in the country to outwalk almost anyone who went with him. No longer. He was suffering from shortness of breath and pains in the chest and in his legs.*1 He would find some excuse to sit down and rest. He never mentioned the symptoms to anyone – not to Nadya, nor his physician brother Dmitry. He had been prone to hypochondria on small health issues, though now he didn’t complain to a doctor. But alone, he consulted medical textbooks. His health worried him, and he had a sense that his life would not be long. He occasionally remarked that his father had died at fifty-four, and when it seemed as if a sentence would follow he remained silent. He appeared to grow even more impatient to complete the work he could in the time he had remaining – and that made him more irritable, impatient and more susceptible to ‘the rages’.

  From early 1921 the effects of insomnia, headaches and general lassitude were evident to those close to him. He was unable to concentrate on work for long periods, infuriating for a man as controlled and driven as he was. Until then, those around him would have agreed with Trotsky that ‘Lenin was considered a man of robust health, he was always active, alert…Only occasionally did I notice alarming symptoms. During the first Congress of…[the Comintern, in 1919] he surprised me with his tired look, the unevenness of his voice and his sick man’s smile. More than once I told him that he was spending himself on matters of secondary importance. He agreed but said that he couldn’t do otherwise. Sometimes he complained of headaches, always casually and with a little embarrassment. But two or three weeks of rest sufficed to restore him. It seemed as if…[he] would never wear out.’1

  From early 1921 he was looking like an ill man, and he recognised it himself. ‘Unfortunately I am very unwell, my nerves are kaput,’ he wrote to Clara Zetkin, during the crisis of the revolt in Tambov Province. A team of doctors – from Russia and abroad – examined him but reached no consensus about what was wrong with him. Most of them diagnosed a neurological condition of some kind, but they were unsure what treatment to offer, apart from rest and a reduction of his workload.

  On 8 July he formally asked for a month’s holiday and went to Gorki. But the rest and recuperation were not having their usual effect. Early in August he wrote to Maxim Gorky: ‘I am so tired that I am unable to do a thing.’ He took the rest of the month off, on the orders of his comrades in the Kremlin.

  He complained increasingly about noise in his office. He demanded that the bells be removed from the telephones on his desk as the sound put his nerves on edge. They were replaced by lights on the handset. When minor refurbishments were being done on his Kremlin apartment, he ordered that the partition walls between the rooms be made ‘absolutely sound-proof, and the floors absolutely free of squeaks’.

  He returned to the Kremlin, with a reduced workload, though still enough to exhaust a well man. In October he blacked out a few times – briefly, and when he recovered he seemed alert. But by the beginning of December he was utterly exhausted and asked for more sick leave. On 7 December, as he left for Gorki, he wrote a memo to his fellow commissars. ‘I am going away today. Despite the reduction in my share of work and the increase of my time for rest in recent days, insomnia has increased devilishly.’

  He was feeling no better in the new year and his leave was extended. It was the headaches that troubled him the most. Two eminent German professors – a physician, Georg Klemperer, and a general surgeon, Julius Borchardt – were summoned to Moscow. Both thought the headaches were caused by lead poisoning from the bullets still inside his body after the assassination attempt. The Russian doctors who had been treating hi
m regularly had major doubts about the diagnosis: Lenin had been suffering from bad headaches for some years before he had been shot and there was no evidence that the bullets were causing any bother. But Lenin and the Commissar for Health, Nikolai Semashko, a practising doctor before the Revolution, argued there was no point bringing the German professors to Russia at considerable expense and then ignoring their advice. It was decided that the bullet in his neck could easily be removed with fairly minor surgery under a local anaesthetic; but the other was lodged deep within Lenin’s left shoulder and demanded a tricky and potentially dangerous operation. ‘Oh well, let’s get rid of the one so people don’t pester me and worry,’ said Lenin. On the morning of 23 April 1922 Professor Borchardt extracted the bullet ‘resting under the right sternoclavicular joint’. The procedure took fifteen minutes and Lenin seemed well. The following afternoon he was back at his desk.2

  —

  While in exile Lenin possessed around him a kind of ‘court’, a clique of loyal followers, the closest thing he had to friends. Though he had kept himself distant as ‘the leader’, for periods in Switzerland and Poland he and Nadya had lived with the Zinovievs and the Kamenevs. Nadya was intimate friends with their wives. Dozens of other Bolsheviks and leftists drifted into their lives. He had dined with them regularly, conspired in cafés, gone on expeditions with them, walked in the Alps with them. In the Kremlin he had practically no social life at all. Possibly this can be said of all dictators. However, Lenin was by any standards remote – not because he had flunkeys outside his doors protecting him from other people: he demanded none of those things; but he made himself more private. He loathed formality, parties and large dinners, which were common among the other magnates. He and Nadya and occasionally Maria had lunch together or an early supper that she had prepared (still woefully badly). The rest of the time he snacked. Even at Gorki he seldom saw people outside of business meetings. Decisions in the early Soviet years were not made, as they would be later under Stalin, late at night with other Communist chieftains over long, elaborate dinners with plenty of vodka and wine. Business was conducted in the Cabinet room – or in secret cabal in his office.

  He was not frosty when he met strangers, but he seldom made a fuss of them either. A stream of foreign visitors wanted to meet the man who was building the first Communist state, a new society. He tried to win them over and often he succeeded: ‘I have seen the future and it works,’ the American journalist Lincoln Steffens famously said after a few days in Moscow which included an hour-long interview with Lenin. He didn’t always charm, though. H. G. Wells, at that point one of the most famous authors in the world, and certainly one of the most self-important, came away unimpressed – as did Lenin, who loathed Wells and thought him pompous. The philosopher Bertrand Russell admired him: ‘Lenin is entirely without a trace of hauteur. If one met him without knowing who he was, one would not guess that he is possessed of great power, or even that he is in any way very eminent. I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance.’ But he was appalled by Bolshevism and was disturbed by Lenin’s laugh, ‘which at first seems friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim’.*2

  Lenin made little effort with his appearance. ‘He always wore the same dark-coloured suit, with pipe-like trousers that always seemed a trifle too short for his legs, with a similarly abbreviated, single-breasted jacket, a soft white collar and an old tie. The necktie, in my opinion, was for years the same: black with little white flowers, one particular spot showing wear. When, sitting at his desk, he received visitors, one could notice that the heels of his shoes were somewhat higher than the ordinary size,’ said Simon Liberman, an old comrade who knew him from the 1890s.

  He made few concessions even when he was posing for an artist. In October 1920 Kamenev persuaded him to sit for the sculptor Clare Consuelo Sheridan, a cousin of Winston Churchill. She was a great beauty and several leading Communist officials fell under her charms, Trotsky included. The rumour was that after he sat for her, they began an affair. Not Lenin, who barely even spoke to her on either of the times they met.

  ‘He has a genial manner and a kindly smile which puts one instantly at ease,’ she said later. He sat at his desk, working, for the first sitting. The next time, a few days later, she persuaded him to pose on a revolving stand. Again they hardly spoke. At one point she asked whether Churchill was the most hated man in Russia. Lenin ‘shrugged his shoulders and said something about Churchill being the man with all the fire of the capitalists behind him’. Lenin told her, smiling, that on the revolving stand ‘I have never sat up so high’. She kneeled before him to study his face from another angle. Putting on her most seductive smile, she asked, ‘Are you accustomed to this attitude in women?’ At this point a (female) secretary appeared and her moment was lost. She said, ‘Give me a message to take back to Winston?’, to which he replied: ‘I have already sent him a message through the [British Labour] delegation and he answered it not directly but through a bitter newspaper article in which he said I was a most horrible creature.’*3, 3

  —

  Lenin’s chief fixer Bonch-Bruevich told a story that three weeks after he was shot by Fanny Kaplan, Lenin ‘became very agitated one day, after he spent half an hour looking at the newspapers. He turned to me reproachfully. “What is this garbage? How could you have allowed this? See what they write…It’s shameful. They call me a genius, a kind of extraordinary man…there is an element of mysticism in all this…they will end up by offering prayers for my health. This is terrible. All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of a single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of an individual hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all that they single me out in such a way.”

  ‘When he had finished I said quietly that people really were devoted…that his office and I personally received an unending flood of enquiries, letters, telephone calls, telegrams wanting to know the state of his health. “All this is extremely moving…I did not know that I gave rise to so much apprehension and anxiety everywhere. But now one should put a halt to all this. It is superfluous and harmful.” Vladimir Ilyich thought it went against our convictions about the role of personality.’4

  The story was probably true. Yet Lenin didn’t put a stop to the ‘cult’ surrounding his name and image, which started in his lifetime and lasted throughout the Soviet years. In an altered form it continues, while his embalmed body remains in Red Square. The idea of leadership cult, so alien to Marx’s or Lenin’s theories, defined the living practice of Communism. Whatever Lenin said he thought about the collective praise of him at parades or the millions of column inches devoted to his genius, he did little to discourage it. The more embarrassed he may have been privately, the deeper it entered into the soul of the Soviet state.

  For his fiftieth birthday in April 1920 the celebrations were extraordinary in their scale and vulgarity. The newspapers spewed out articles applauding his personal qualities of courage, wisdom and sagacity. Posters of him began appearing in public places for the first time, postcards were printed of his face, badges were minted. In schools children were taught to refer to ‘Dyedushka Lenin’. Two official biographies were published for general readers. Mayakovsky wrote a sycophantic birthday ode, even though he knew how much Lenin loathed his work:

  But who can constrain himself

  And not sing

  of the glory of Ilyich?

  Kindling the lands with fire everywhere,

  where people are imprisoned,

  like a bomb

  the name

  explodes:

  Lenin!

  Lenin!

  Lenin!…

  I glorify

  in Lenin

  world faith

  and glorify

  my faith.

  There is no record of Lenin making any comment about the poem.

  The Party organised a huge commemorat
ive meeting to honour him. One after the other his old comrades Zinoviev, Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Bukharin, Trotsky and Stalin spoke of his greatness. Lenin was not there. When the tributes were over he put in an appearance to make some brief remarks, not of personal reminiscence but a lecture about the history of the revolutionary movement. He ended by warning the Party against ‘complacency and conceit, which could turn it into something stupid, shameful and ridiculous’. He could have chosen instead to have a simple birthday celebration at home, had he wished.

  *1 Symptoms which doctors nowadays would speedily test for ischaemic heart disease and/or arteriosclerosis.

  *2 Russell wrote in 1919: ‘I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts…as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery…The price mankind must pay to achieve Communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible…and even after paying the price I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.’ However, after meeting Lenin he wrote to one of his lovers, Lady Ottoline Morrell, that Communism was probably right for Russia – ‘If you ask yourself how Dostoyevsky’s characters should be governed you will understand.’